Reid Hoffman: Silicon Valley Grandmaster

What It Takes®

Academy of Achievement

Film, Politics, Arts, Self-help, Sports, Society & Culture, Success, Literature, Humanitarian, Military, Social Justice, Technology, Podcast, Achievement, Music, Science

4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

LinkedIn changed the way people navigate the world of work. It's hard to even remember the days (though not that long ago) when jobseekers opened the back of a newspaper to scan the help wanted ads. Well, LinkedIn was the brainchild of Reid Hoffman, one of the Silicon Valley visionaries who recognized, back in the 1990's, the internet's potential for a new kind of social and professional networking. In this episode he talks about how his background in philosophy led him to tech entrepreneurship. And he provides some fascinating stories about the early days of the online revolution. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2017

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you go to LinkedIn and look up Reed Hoffman's profile, this is how he describes himself.
0:08.0	Entrepreneur, Product Strategist, Investor.
0:12.4	It actually takes a little work to find the part where he says he's the
0:15.9	guy who came up with LinkedIn. He created it and he helped start the revolution in social
0:22.3	networking. These days what he mostly does is help
0:25.8	other entrepreneurs get off the ground. One of the metaphors I use for
0:30.1	entrepreneurship is you jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.
0:33.4	Reed Hoffman is talking a little fast here so let me rephrase. His metaphor bears repeating anyway.
0:39.6	Being an entrepreneur, he said, is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way
0:47.0	down. To do this more intelligently you're choosing your cliff, you're choosing when you're preparing
1:00.6	yourself with the right materials, the right teammates to jump over the cliff with, these sorts of things.
1:06.0	But sometimes you just have a love of this technology or this area and you stumble your way into it.
1:12.0	So it's not, you know, you can stumble your way into it.
1:13.0	So it's not, you know, you can be more systematic, you can increase your probabilities,
1:17.0	you can increase your scale of outcome.
1:20.0	But also sometimes, you know, people are just like, they happen to be doing something
1:26.2	I love and all of a sudden the commercial models and venture and everything else goes
1:31.1	into it and all of a sudden it's off to the races.
1:33.7	This is what it takes from the Academy of Achievement, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance.
1:41.2	Today we're adding philosophy and entrepreneurship to that list
1:45.2	because we're devoting this episode to the remarkable career of Silicon
1:50.2	Valley soothsayer Reed Hoffman. I'm Alice Winkler.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Academy of Achievement, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Academy of Achievement and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.